Not that you’d know it from the picture. She’d been hiding behind a well-developed wall of confidence and nonchalance that hadn’t come easily.
She held the picture between thumb and forefinger and looked at Cesar across the desk. He was totally unrepentant. Something hard settled into her gut. The awareness she had of his sheer masculine physicality made her feel like a fool. And very vulnerable—which she did not welcome. It had been a long time since she’d allowed anyone to make her feel that way.
Then she saw the open file and all the other cuttings and clippings and pictures. She didn’t have to read the lurid headlines to know what the characters said even from here, upside down. Luscious Lexie.
She went icy. Her bag slipped to the floor unnoticed.
‘What is this?’
‘This,’ Cesar da Silva offered tautly, ‘is your life, I believe.’
Lexie looked at Cesar and right at that moment despised him. She’d barely exchanged more than twenty sentences with the man, and he’d displayed not an ounce of charm, yet she’d blithely allowed him to be more intimate with her than any other man had ever been.
Her conscience mocked her. That wasn’t technically true, of course. But the other experience in her life hadn’t been consensually intimate. It had been a horrifically brutal parody of intimacy.
Lexie forced her mind away from that and raged inwardly at the injustice of his evident blind belief in the lies spread before him. She hated that a part of her wanted to curl up and cringe at how all this evidence was laid out so starkly across his desk. Ugly.
She forced her voice to be light, to hide the raging tumult. ‘And do you believe everything you read in the papers, Mr Da Silva?’
He gritted out, ‘Call me Cesar.’
Lexie smiled prettily, hiding her ire, ‘Well, when you ask so nicely...Cesar.’
‘I don’t care enough to give the time to believe or disbelieve. I couldn’t really care less about your tawdry sex life with married men.’
Lexie saw red. She literally saw a flash of red. She forced air into her lungs. Clenching her jaw so tight it hurt, she bit out, ‘Well, then, perhaps you’d be so kind as to let me know what you want to discuss so that I can get on with my tawdry life.’
* * *
Cesar had to force back the urge to smile for a second. She’d surprised him. Standing up to him so fiercely. Like a tiny virago. Or a pocket Venus.
It took an immense physical effort not to let his gaze drop and linger on the swell of her breasts under the clinging soft material of her top. Or to investigate just how snugly those worn jeans fitted her bottom.
When she’d walked in he’d taken in the slim, shapely legs. The very feminine swell of her hips. She was the perfect hourglass, all wrapped up in a petite, intoxicating package. Her hair was loose and wavy over her shoulders. Bright against the dark wood of his office. Against the darkness of the castillo. Something lanced him in a place that was buried, deep and secret. He didn’t welcome it.
He didn’t like that he’d also noticed her beauty spot was gone. The artifice of make-up. It mocked him for believing himself to have been in some sort of a dream earlier. For thinking she was some sort of goddess siren straight out of a Greek myth.
But she was no less alluring now in modern clothes than she had been in a corset and petticoats. In fact, now that Cesar knew the flesh her clothes concealed, it was almost worse.
And he’d just been ruder to this woman than he’d ever been to another in his life.
He could actually be urbane. Charming. But as soon as he’d laid eyes on her again he’d felt animalistic. Feral. Even now his blood thundered, roared. For her. And she wasn’t even remotely his type.
He ran a hand through his hair impatiently. His conscience demanded of him that he say, ‘Look, maybe we can start again. Take a seat.’
Lexie oozed tension and quivering insult. And he couldn’t blame her. Even if her less than pristine life was spread all over his desk.
‘I’m fine standing, thank you. And where, might I ask, did you get your hands on what appears to be a veritable scrapbook of my finest moments?’
Her voice could have cut through steel it was so icy. Cesar almost winced.
‘Someone working on the film compiled information on the cast and crew.’ His eye caught another lurid shot of Lexie pouting over the bonnet of a car. His body tightened. He willed himself to cling on to some control. ‘It would appear that person was a little over-zealous with the back catalogue of your work.’
Lexie flushed, her cheeks filling with dark colour, and Cesar felt his conscience twinge again. As if he was in the wrong. When this woman was standing there with her chin tilted up, defiant in the face of her less than stellar reputation.
She came forward and Cesar’s gaze couldn’t help but drop to where her breasts swayed gently under her top. She stopped at the other side of the desk and put her hands on it and glared at him, her huge blue eyes sending out daggers of ice.
She plucked out the image of her on the car and held it up accusingly. ‘This is not a back catalogue of work. This is a naive young girl, trying to get on in a ruthless cut-throat business—a girl who didn’t have the confidence or economic security to say no to bullying agents and photographers.’
She spat out the words.
‘You might consider that the next time you find it so easy to judge someone you were only too happy to kiss without even knowing who she was.’
Before Cesar could respond to her spiky defence, not liking the rush of a very alien emotion within him, she’d gathered up all the cuttings and pictures, her CV and head-shots, and marched over to a nearby bin, dumping the lot.
She turned around, her hair shimmering as it moved over her shoulder. She crossed her arms. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to discuss?’
* * *
Lexie hated that her body was humming with awareness for this man. Who was blissfully immune to the angry emotions he was arousing.
What a judgmental, supercilious, arrogant, small-minded—
‘I owe you an apology,’ he said tightly.
Lexie blinked. The anger inside her suffered a body-blow. ‘Yes, you do.’
His mouth was a grim line. ‘I had no right to judge you on the basis of those pictures.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Lexie snapped, but then she flushed again when she thought of another similar shoot she’d done relatively recently—albeit for a much more up-market publication and with a world-famous photographer. But still, she couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground either... ‘It’s fine,’ she dismissed airily, ‘let’s forget about it.’
He sighed heavily then, and opened up the laptop that was on the desk in front of him. ‘You should see this.’
Trepidation skittered over her skin. Warily Lexie walked
